Scottish heroes and William Wallace Jamieson of The Wide Net, surely, we might be tempted to think, the combination brings southern history into the story despite all evidence to the contrary. The Malones are like horses, and the Doyles are never without their dogs. I should make it clear it was not the quality of the scholarship in what I read that puzzled me, but my consternation in not finding anything of my own life in the popular myths contained in the books. His grandfather had been branded by the devil in a storm, Lightn. To begin with, the southern world I grew up in, a small coastal town in Florida in the years after WWII, was not all that representative of the South. But during its moment, all that is remembered joins, and livesthe old and the young, the past and the present, the living and the dead (Welty. Robbie is right to be frightened. Like my grandfather, Beanie was color blind as far as race was concerned. It runs in our family, Robbie says (Welty. He possesses an old mans horde of lifelong certitudes. During the wars of Scottish independence in the thirteenth century, William Wallace was the great leader and hero, whom popular tradition in the mists of time has now elevated to mythical proportions. Perhaps nature itself, the mother of all myth, is the true heart of the story. At this point the mythic and symbolic allusions begin to overwhelm, but I believe, as you know by now, that their very proliferation throws into high relief the singular nature of one mans all too human crisis. and Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Myths are necessary to our lives and imagination, especially as children. 180). Its so sad that the culture that could have put these good hearted folks bare-feet in the creek was long ago swallowed up by progress. When he escaped he went back to his native state of Georgia and lived to a ripe old age. Trans. Both his grandfather and his father were struck by lightning. It was, however, filled with southerners. Hazels name evokes the Celtic symbol of wisdom and the source of life hidden in underground water. Boys, he said, I didnt run, but I did some mighty high walking. I hope I have not run away from the myth of the South, but I admit I may have done some high walking. Thank you for the indulgence, and the invitation. Still, casting around for something to say about the way the South (from within and without) seems to have been designed, destined, or doomed, to generate a mythic vision, or visions, often in contradiction with each other, my thoughts could not help going back to The Wide Net.. 37Beanie deserves his own story. The river never seems the same, yet even when William Wallace forgets its name, its ageless identity is never in question: The winding river looked old sometimes, when it ran wrinkled and deep under high banks where the roots of trees hung down, and sometimes it seemed to be only a young creek, shining with the colors of wildflowers (Welty. This is the truth that William Wallace discovers by himself, and somehow memory, lost and found, is crucial to the discovery. The Wide Net. I have tried to explain, to myself more than to anyone else, that the multiplication of myth and legend in The Wide Net is there, in all its rich jumbling, to nudge the reader elsewhere. What impressed me most was the incongruity of seeing such a stark inscription on a Baptist tombstone. Since in the South, as I had finally learned in Chapel Hill, history tends to breed myth as a kind of natural law, I needed at least to consider the question. 7William Wallace Jamieson, the first words of the story, and a name I will return to, is a young man who has been married to his wife, Hazel, for a year. The town was neatly divided into black and white neighborhoods, but my grandfathers house had been deliberately chosen because it was right on the border between the two and my cousins and I played and talked with black children every day. Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. The strands are all there: to the memory nothing is ever really lost (Welty, One Writers Beginnings 90). He had earned the name by winning a juke joint contest for having the biggest feet in Florida. , one of Eudora Weltys favorite books, Twain makes the outrageous, though irresistible, claim that Scott and his historical romances helped cause the Civil War by promoting a mythical vision of history, and by shaping the southern character: It was Sir Walter Scott that made every gentleman in the South a Major or Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations Sir Walter Scott had so large a hand in making the southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible (266). Timeless stories from our 172-year archive handpicked to speak to the news of the day. The Malones are indistinguishable from each other, and so are the Doyles. I could easily call to mind other memories that would deepen and darken the story. I had fished and hunted in the great inland swamps, and had built rafts of giant bamboo to ride with my friends down the St Lucie River, surely as haunting and as hidden away as the Pearl River in The Wide Net. The alligators slept with the water lilies and the night-blooming cereus, and the Spanish moss fell in thick curtains on both banks. Sir Walter Scott celebrated both William Wallace and Bonnie Prince Charles, the latter in the most popular series of historical novels ever written, the Waverly novels. In the afternoons my friends and I would go down to the icehouse where sacks of ice were filled for the professional fishing boats. It seemed odd to me too when I began thinking about the challenge of adding anything new to a debate that as we all know began long before the South became the South. Us is the fishes (Welty. The Wide Net has been one of my favorite stories for at least forty years. And the final story in The Wide Net (and thus the collection itself) concludes with the portrait of a young woman who is rejected, and is forced to face absolute desolation and a serial rape. 32But I digress, drifting with the memory. The thing about this part of the country in the great days is that people like Aaron Burr, J.J. Audubon, Lorenzo Dow, and goodness knows who, were as thick as blackbirds in the pie, and once the pie is opened, they are going to begin to sing (qtd. Still, if I should apologize, I do. The Internet started off with research into what was then known as packet switching as early as the 1960s. 25I began this paper with a confession. Still, the shock of my initial consternation never left me, thus my impulse to turn back to Eudora Welty and my memory of The Wide Net and its mysteries when I was invited to talk about the great myths of the South. So I grew up surrounded by southern voices. When William dives into the river, and emerges transformed, the myth-minded reader may then think once more of the Aeneid, and of the river Lethe which the original Virgil tells us must be imbibed by dead souls in order for them to be reborn. Press in the Library of Southern Civilization series. 171). Like the theater, like the wearing of masks, like the playing of games, myths are ways of trying out the world, testing other lives, often for the sheer joy of forgetting our own predicament. I wanted to talk to him, so my mother invited him over to the house. There seemed to be a force in the family that drove it to act or speak out, with or without the common consensus. I benefited from these books as much as anyone. A more distant past was hidden behind the Spanish place names and the faces of the Seminole Indians who worked as cowboys on the ranches. There is Old Doc, the local wise man who owns the net. As Welty adds in her autobiography, there were Edna Earles all over the South. The story recounts how Sister, the intelligent and ironic narrator, comes to fall out with her family over incidents arising from her younger sister Stella-Rondo's sudden reappearance in their small southern town, minus her husband and with a two-year-old "adopted" child in tow. Old Doc lives on a hill and can usually be found in his rocking chair. But the town itself was lively and busy and relatively sheltered from the poverty and misery that remained a plague throughout the greater South even in the 1950s. 176). Myths are necessary to our lives and imagination, especially as children. . The Wide Net. [] Old Jack Frost will be pinching things up. The fact that William Wallace allows them to come even though they are too young to be of much help may imply that the value of his own fatherhood is beginning to dawn on him. Knowing Eudora Weltys love of Ireland and the Irish, the echo is surely deliberate. Whenever Walter Scott is mentioned in the context of the South, Mark Twains theory of the Civil War and the southern imagination immediately leaps to mind. The Malones are indistinguishable from each other, and so are the Doyles. Once again, however, we cannot escape the fact that names are chosen for us. I think my grandfathers reputation helped me too in an experience that will stay with me as long as I live. As Mr Duval finished, and stood up to leave, he reached out to me and shook my hand: Your granddaddy was the only white man I ever loved.. There is no great central Southern myth in The Wide Net. But I must have half-remembered that the potency of the mythic, including a few old southern folktales or legends, does play a key role in the story, especially by pounding the pedal throughout on the truth that no myth, potent or not, can ever measure up to one mans solitary predicament. Old Mr. Winter will be standing in the door. Had he suspected down there, like some secret, the real, the true trouble that Hazel had fallen into, about which words in a letter could not speak Or in a myth, I cannot help adding. 1. I began this paper with a confession. Instead of one of the more conventional pieties, here was a crying out to both God and man against injustice. Sam wore them around his head, with a knot over his forehead and loops around his ears, and Robbie Bell walked behind and stared at them (Welty, Collected Stories 179). He is holding fast to a little green ribbon of plant, root and all (Welty. It was, however, filled with southerners. There doesn't seem to be a regularization effect from very high depth in residual net- works as wide networks with the same number of parameters as thin ones can learn same or better representations. Each of us is moving, changing, with respect to others. They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors. At this point the mythic and symbolic allusions begin to overwhelm, but I believe, as you know by now, that their very proliferation throws into high relief the singular nature of one mans all too human crisis. I benefited from these books as much as anyone. When William Wallace gets home, he notices a night rainbow over his house, though it clearly hadn't rained there. The grown-up Doyles and Malones are fixed in their undefined identities forever. Given her love of Hurston, a spell had been cast, and the promise of a new myth stopped her in her tracks. We may take this with a grain of salt, but the fascination with Scottish heroes in the South would have made the name of William Wallace a common choice. Myth may help shape an identity, but memory is the single vital source of selfhood, and the key, I believe, to William Wallace and The Wide Net. Despite the help of the search party, the willingness of the community to lend a hand, William Wallace must forget the outside world before he plunges into the inner, and by so doing, he recovers Hazel, who as Old Doc knows, has been there all the time. 40I have tried to explain, to myself more than to anyone else, that the multiplication of myth and legend in The Wide Net is there, in all its rich jumbling, to nudge the reader elsewhere. I was fifteen years old, and was the only white in the group of workers. Neither does Eudora Welty in her autobiography, and she is one of the most southern writers who ever existed. She ends. This was her 3rd book of fiction, another collection of stories; published in 1943 after the Robber Bridegroom. But the history of the South itself came to me mainly through the stories I heard in my family. They were later given to the University of Florida. Perhaps nature itself, the mother of all myth, is the true heart of the story. We may remember his prayer: If only the golden bough/Might shine for us in such a wilderness! (Vergil 166). This was not because it was dangerous, or unseemly; it was simply against the code. I like to think too, along these same lines, that the comic folklore of the first half of the story makes his solitary dive in the Pearl River, and his transformation, more unpredictable, and thus more human. She continues several pages later: It is our inward journey that leads us through timeforward or back, seldom in a straight line, most often spiraling. Faced with the most serious crisis of his young life, William at least has the resourcefulness to ask help from one of his friends from the night out, Virgil Thomas, and they set out to borrow the wide net from Old Doc, and to gather other members of the community to help drag the river. The Pearl River is the prime example in The Wide Net and therefore the source of selfhood that will save William Wallace. The story ends with Hazel calling his name from the bedroom. William Wallace will soon demonstrate a stronger will in a more heroic gesture than catching a rabbit. 184). Apparently, there was one male survivor of the Battle of the Alamo in 1836. 45Of course writing her autobiography is a proof of that power, but Eudora Welty goes further. Everything just before it changes looks to be made of gold. Immediately William Wallace looked down, as though he thought of Hazel with the shining eyes, sitting at home and looking straight before her, like a piece of pure gold, too precious to touch (Welty, Collected Stories 176). There I was shocked to learn I may have been born into a myth, despite myself. What was her first novel and when was it published? Once every now and then I rode my horse to school where there was a rail fence and where the teachers allowed us to eat our lunch sitting down by the horses. When Alice Walker wrote her essay about finding Hurstons unmarked grave, and lamented the lack of a headstone, she was writing only part of the story. The Rebellion failed, and Bonnie Prince Charles escaped to become another legend of Scottish resistance. As for me, being known as his grandson allowed me, and my two cousins who lived in his house, special status among the blacks, and a carelessness about crossing the color line. William goes to get his friend, Virgil, with whom he'd spent the night carousing, and the pair of them round up some neighborhood men to drag the river. The only shade was provided by a long tin shed next to the sludge bin. She ends One Writers Beginnings with a celebration of memory that for her has now become a personal creed, and has allowed her to begin her life as a writer. . After all, where else can I look for a better source? Us is the fishes (Welty, Collected Stories 183). He surely died the poorest judge in all of Florida, but he did leave me his gold Hamilton watch which had been given him when he retired from working on the railroad as a young man in Georgia. Hazels name evokes the Celtic symbol of wisdom and the source of life hidden in underground water. This is the truth that William Wallace discovers by himself, and somehow memory, lost and found, is crucial to the discovery. , notably First Love, and A Still Moment, to name the most powerful. But the real proof of his character came at noon, when we all stopped to have lunch. William Wallace is beset on all sides by distractions, advice, omens, signs of all sorts. Last Updated on June 19, 2019, by eNotes Editorial. Soon after his triumphant dive, William Wallace smiles for the first time, and falls asleep, but not for long. Ben Forkner, Converging Toward the Human: Myth and Theory in "The Wide Net" (and me),Journal of the Short Story in English [En ligne], 67|Autumn 2016, mis en ligne le 01 dcembre 2018, consult le 02 mars 2023. He could lift hundred-pound sacks of fertilizer with each hand. Print. The Golden Apples. The one I want to tell about my grandfather concerns another man involved in the Zora Neale Hurston saga. The story works on several levels and gives the viewer no clue as to whether it should be taken seriously at all. 30But these Georgia tales were of the kind that Eudora Welty describes as old and complete in Asphodel, one of the short stories in The Wide Net. Subscribers can purchase the slipcased edition by signing in to their accounts. It has been a delightful day of adventure on the river for the Malones, the Doyles, and the others (including the reader), but the wide net (a sort of local myth itself) has caught nothing, except a haul of fish, a big eel, old shoes, the baby alligator, and a string of beads. Lush, precise, and unpredictable in every line, The Wide Net is one of the greatest odes to the natural world ever written. Internet, a system architecture that has revolutionized communications and methods of commerce by allowing various computer networks around the world to interconnect. The second is the date of Furthermore, wide networks can successfully learn with a . It will not be lost on the reader that the structure of The Wide Net roughly follows the same literary source, proceeding from hell, to purgatory, and finally to paradise. The wide net. Then group returns to town, everyone carrying their heavy strings of fish. with a celebration of memory that for her has now become a personal creed, and has allowed her to begin her life as a writer. in Marrs 70-71). What touched me more, and what I remember best now, were the lives around me while growing up. He was a big man, steady and straight despite his age, and must have been a formidable force in making an arrest. Still, the shock of my initial consternation never left me, thus my impulse to turn back to Eudora Welty and my memory of The Wide Net and its mysteries when I was invited to talk about the great myths of the South. It was written forty years after The Wide Net but I was gratified to find her speak of myth and memory in a way that confirmed what I thought I had found in the story. They all carried their classic illustrations. But there were no old plantations or slave quarters, and no signs to mark the battles of the Civil War since there had been no battles. I grew up during segregation, but the racism was subdued, and codified down to a syllable and a glance. He walked on. The narration continues to speculate how (who knew?) They talked sometimes about a black giant named Foots. Print. He had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by defying convention, but I do not think his prestige in the white community was ever at risk. The shifting from one realm to another is a constant possibility. It is enough to make Virgil sigh with despair: when you go looking for what is lost, everything is a sign (Welty, Collected Stories 179). Now us got scales, Sam cried out. The first page of Tim Berners-Lee's proposal for the World Wide Web, written in March 1989 (Image: CERN) Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first proposal for the World Wide Web in March 1989 and his second proposal in May 1990.Together with Belgian systems engineer Robert Cailliau, this was formalised as a management proposal in November 1990. This blend of domestic realism with mythology and ancient fertility tales is characteristic of the entire collection, in which ordinary people are somehow connected to the myths of other cultures. What was missing in this southern town was southern history, or at least any striking display of history. 19Her reaction is more than understandable. When I was invited to speak about the myth of the South, the thought of Weltys The Wide Net, came to my mind in a flash. But even children are sensitive to the boundary between the real and the fictional, and would hate to hear their father repeat the soliloquies of Hamlet from breakfast to bedtime even if he made a living as an actor. In Life on the Mississippi, one of Eudora Weltys favorite books, Twain makes the outrageous, though irresistible, claim that Scott and his historical romances helped cause the Civil War by promoting a mythical vision of history, and by shaping the southern character: It was Sir Walter Scott that made every gentleman in the South a Major or Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations Sir Walter Scott had so large a hand in making the southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible (266). Print. A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality study guides that feature detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, quotes, and essay topics.
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the wide net summary